FAMILY | FREELANCE | FICTION
Where I Come From
Portrait of a compulsive copy writer…who also likes to revise
As a life-long writer who’s also a journalism school graduate, corporate communicator, blogger, novelist, short story writer, and poet, I’m a total word nerd. Since I currently work in a marketing department copy editing everything under the sun, I should say I’m primarily a copy editor, but that reveals only part of the picture.
I grew up in upstate New York in Syracuse; attended Syracuse University; and have lived in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Nashville, Dallas, and Denver. My three kids have grown up primarily in Denver, so that’s where my immediate family calls home. My extended family (pictured above sans one brother; I’m the second sister from the right), live all over the U.S., with my parents still in the house they bought shortly after I turned one.
Working girl
I’ve been part of creative services and marketing departments of multiple companies and have always found the corporate world, especially when I’m in a department that includes graphic designers and other creative types, a fun, secure source of income for myself as a copy writer and editor. After holding a variety of odd jobs in high school, I was impressed when I started my first summer job in an office as a college student and realized people got paid to work at a desk all day — and got weekends off. Sign me up.
In between corporate gigs when I was a stay-at-home mom, I did short- and long-term freelance projects that included writing as well as editing everything from emails to book manuscripts. While back then it was called Elance.com and then oDesk.com, Upwork.com is a good resource for those who want to find steady, paying freelance work. Word of mouth once you get a track record of being dependable and efficient and good at what you do also helps bring in new clients.
Diversity awareness
I also blogged in pre-Facebook days on my blog Beyond Understanding in order to research and highlight resources that celebrate diversity. My immediate family is multiracial, and I had a lot to learn about issues my biracial husband had faced for years and my children were just beginning to face. Much more recently I wrote about one of my daughter’s early experiences with racial identity in this personal essay on the Medium publication Our Human Family:
On the fiction front, I’ve had short stories win a few honorable mentions and an award in a Writer’s Digest competition, and my poems have appeared in small lit mags. I appreciate that some Medium publications publish fiction and poetry and so far have opted to post one sample of each:
One of my side projects is to submit my creative writing to literary journals, and I find Submittable and Duotrope helpful on that front:
A novelist is born
A long time ago I penned my first novel, which was published by a small publisher here in Denver that became an early adopter of print-on-demand publishing. After I sold (primarily to friends and family!) my first print run of my novel, One Sister’s Song, which explores issues faced by people of multiracial heritage, the second edition was published via BookSurge, which eventually became Amazon’s CreateSpace and is now Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The nice thing about all that is the fact my first novel is still in print after many years.
My second novel is with my literary agent, and my third novel is in the works. My goal is to finish the first draft of #3 within the next five months. I know that’s only part of the process, though, but luckily I (really, really) enjoy revising and look forward to that, especially if I find a talented developmental editor to work with me as I have in the past. While I love copy editing, developmental editing is very different, and those who perform that task well impress me — a lot. As do teachers, scientists, musicians, and visual artists. And writers who knock out amazing works one right after another. Since 30 years will have passed between the time I began writing my first novel and the time I’m likely to finish revising my third, I don’t consider myself a prolific novelist. But I’ve also helped raise three kids during those years, so there’s that.
Invitation to share
I appreciate the chance to introduce myself to other members of the team at Illumination, which I’m finding very welcoming. One of the best things about writing on Medium in general and Illumination in particular is the chance to share some of the new things I discover and some of the things I love, including definitively word-nerdy things like grammar tips and tricks and more broad topics such as hydration, which I explored in my first Illumination article:
Having a platform that allows and encourages me to research and write about all sorts of things — and provides supportive publications that publish, feature, and help promote my work — makes this compulsive writer very happy. Especially since I also love connecting with other writers. Please feel free to respond with a link to your Illumination bio and/or one of your favorite Illumination posts. I look forward to reading your work!
I write fiction, poetry, and nonfiction when I’m not working as a copy editor. Author of the novel One Sister’s Song.